ASK HN: How to engineer a JavaScript to Python migration?
Context: I was tasked with migrating a legacy workflow system (Broadcom CA Workflow Automation) to Airflow.
There are some jobs that contain rather simple JavaScript snippets, and I was trying to design a first prototype that simply takes the JS parts and runs them in a transpiler.
In this respect, I found a couple of packages that could be leveraged: - js2py: https://github.com/PiotrDabkowski/Js2Py - mini-racer: https://github.com/bpcreech/PyMiniRacer Yet, both seem to be abandoned packages that might not be suitable for usage in production.
Therefore, I was thinking about parsing and translating Javascript's abstract syntax trees to Python. Whereas a colleague suggested I bring up an LLM pipeline.
How much of an overkill that might be? Has anyone else ever dealt with a JavaScript-to-Python migration and could share heads-ups on strategies or pitfalls to avoid?
I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA
I'll be here for the next 6 hours. As usual, there are countless possible topics and I'll be guided by whatever you're concerned with but as much as possible I'd like to focus on the recent changes and potential changes in U.S. immigration law, policy, and practice. Please remember that I am limited in providing legal advice on specific cases for obvious liability reasons because I won't have access to all the facts. Please stick to a factual discussion in your questions and comments and I'll try to do the same in my responses. Thank you!
Ask HN: How to stop Google from autocorrecting our company name?
Our small cloud consulting company Autimo has been facing a frustrating issue with Google searches. Whenever potential clients try to search for our company name “Autimo,” Google automatically corrects it to “autismo,” which is obviously not ideal for our brand.
We’re a Vancouver-based cloud consulting firm founded in 2018, specializing in DevOps, cloud engineering, and AWS/Azure/GCP solutions. This autocorrection issue is becoming a real problem for our discoverability and brand identity.
Has anyone dealt with a similar autocorrection problem? What strategies worked for you to make Google recognize your brand name as a legitimate search term? We’ve considered various approaches but would appreciate insights from the HN community on the most effective solutions.
Would increasing our online presence help? Should we contact Google directly? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Ask HN: Any insider takes on Yann LeCun's push against current architectures?
So, Lecun has been quite public saying that he believes LLMs will never fix hallucinations because, essentially, the token choice method at each step leads to runaway errors -- these can't be damped mathematically.
In exchange, he offers the idea that we should have something that is an 'energy minimization' architecture; as I understand it, this would have a concept of the 'energy' of an entire response, and training would try and minimize that.
Which is to say, I don't fully understand this. That said, I'm curious to hear what ML researchers think about Lecun's take, and if there's any engineering done around it. I can't find much after the release of ijepa from his group.
Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
Kudos to the folks keeping it running.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)
Tell HN: SaaS Is the New SEO
With advent of modern web and it's centralization, many niche platforms died.
Those that are still alive are almost undiscoverable due to google being gamed to death by SEO companies.
Reddit, once source of authentic content, is bots talking to bots and people trying to sell and promote. Most of youtube videos are part of someone's sales funnel.
With a new wave of AI, it's even harder to discover authentic content. ProductHunt, IndieHacker and Show HN communities are being gamed with cheap to produce SaaS prototypes following MVP concept. Almost all of them are getting very little to no traction.
Digital products of high craftsmanship with attention to detail are aliens in modern web.
As a result, traditinal startup advice becoming irrelevant as people develop SaaS blindness and don't want to waste their time giving feedback in exchange for nothing.
Please, prove me wrong, but major AI companies are operating at a loss, creating (OpenAI, Anthropic) and reselling (Cursor, Lovable) tokens at a loss on each stage, with a hope to recoupe it with IPO from pension funds and other holders of someone else's money.
Are there any products worth attention created on platforms like Lovable, Bolt? Any code worth reading generated by Cursor, Windsurf?
Ask HN: How do I deal with a cease and desist notice for my open HW project?
Hi HN,
I've been working on an open-source hardware project for years, but the hosting site where I posted the documentation received a cease and desist notice to remove it. Strangely, they didn’t contact me directly. I'm nearing the end of the project and planning to sell the device, but now I'm concerned about legal risks.
An IP lawyer told me even a basic patent review would cost thousands, which is out of my budget. My research suggests many of these threats are intimidation tactics, but it feels different when you're the target.
I'm looking for advice from those who’ve dealt with similar HW-related legal issues. I see three options:
Abandon the project (losing years of work and money)
Pivot, but risk another dispute (everything seems patented)
Call their bluff and hope they don’t sue
Am I thinking about this clearly? Thank you.
Ask HN: How to use social media as an indie dev?
I'm an independent developer looking to launch a project soon that I'm excited about. I'll obviously post it here as a Show HN, and maybe in a few subreddits - but I'm out of the loop on where and how to reach more people. Haven't had a Facebook or other social media for years. I don't maintain a blog, though I assume I should. Does anyone have any resources or can speak to any experience doing this? Of the many hats I now must wear, this is the one I'm most begrudging about.
Ask HN: How much traffic do you serve and with which database engine?
It's common to see here that Postgres hosted in RDS can handle 99% of workloads up to millions of users. I'm building an IoT app with a plan to ingest the IoT traffic into dynamo partitioned on user id (I'm quite familiar with the tradeoffs) and everything else be in Postgres. A few services but not microservice (basically: core service, identity service, IoT data service, notification service). Ingesting and monitoring about 1,000,000 IoT devices daily (1 packer per device per day) and about 1,000,000 users with only 5,000 active users per day (basically we monitor user IoT devices 24/7 but only some 5,000 users will have anomalous results and log in).
In the database posts & discussions here I sometimes find that the opinions are strong but the numbers are missing. Obviously applications have wide variation in traffic and query complexity so apples to apples comparisons are hard. Still, I would greatly benefit from hearing some real world experiences with numbers.
Rough approximation database questions for current or prior applications:
1. How many customers do you have?
2. What's expected daily traffic? Peak traffic?
3. What database engine or engines do you use?
4. How many rows or how much storage does your db have?
5. What else about your application is relevant for database load?
6. Microservice, Service, or monolith. Happy with it?
Ask HN: Apple, Google, Samsung wallet, why aren't there any better alternatives
I'm trying to wrap my head around why there isn't a wallet app that auto selects card to pay based on the merchant you are paying yet. Most people I know have 5+ credit cards and only use one card to tap everywhere not bothering about rotating rewards on other cards that could give them better cash back. Why they have other cards? So that they can have them on standby and use them incase they have to make a bigger purchase.
So I why didn't someone tap into this market? Because I know banks make same if not more money even if customers avail these extra rewards. Whats stopping apple or google from adding this feature. Whats stopping anyone else from entering this market and competing to tapping into this niche? Because it is totally possible given visa master card and amex provide the APIs for it and there is virtually not much technical magic needed to pull this off.
Would you use a wallet that could
1. Auto-select card that gives you maximum rewards at a given vendor/merchant 2. Suggest a better card based on your spending pattern 3. Auto-select card based on your spending pattern (sometimes accumulating points and buying planes tickets is much more lucrative) 4. More interesting UI than Google Pay/Apple Pay
Would you use this service? or even more, pay 25 bucks a year for this service?
Nubmq: A high performant key-value store engine built from first principles
not able to post the link in url for some reason, here it is: https://github.com/nubskr/nubmq
Tell HN: Beware phishing via GitHub Issues notifications
I've seen a recent surge in phishing attempts that post a markdown phishing message as an Issue in order to trigger GitHub to (legitimately) send an email that looks like a security warning to all repo followers.
For example: https://github.com/aojibril, https://github.com/transporindo, https://github.com/kirukatodrag
Ask HN: How do you handle VAT / Sales Tax accounting as B2C SaaS?
Hey! I run a B2C SaaS and I use Stripe for all of my sales (subscriptions).
I am looking to learn how others handle their VAT / Sales Tax filing.
I know that the standard answer would be to use Paddle / LemonSqueezy / Polar.sh, but I already have a lot of subscribers on Stripe which makes quick migration non-trivial.
I am especially looking for some reliable accounting companies / accountants that can register and file Sales Tax across US, UK, Canada, Australia, etc. (It does not have to be a global solution).
It's my understanding that solutions like Stripe Tax, Alavara, Quaderno, etc. only help collect the necessary data (which I consider the easier part, at least for digital goods), but do not handle the registration & filing (though I've learned that Quaderno will support filing Sales Tax in the US on your behalf soon).
---
Some jurisdictions are relatively easy to handle (for example, one can handle whole EU by uploading a simple CSV [1] once a quarter and the CSV is easy to generate from Stripe's records).
But unfortunately there are tons of others that are much more complicated and scattered -- for example, due to the economic nexus laws in the US, I now have to file Sales Tax in each individual state where I am over the threshold (and many states have thresholds in low hundreds of transactions, so it's not hard to reach).
[1]: https://www.elster.de/bportal/helpGlobal?themaGlobal=osseust_import
[2]: If you do not feel comfortable commenting here, you can also reach out at z2qmk@pekoi.com (temporary email)
Ask HN: What kind of whiteboard do you use that does NOT use dry erase markers?
I've been using a dry erase whiteboard for decades and am in the market for something different. Someone mentioned in another thread they were using some kind of magnetic board (maybe it wasn't magnets, I can't remember 100%) but I can't find anything like this online.
Anybody have any recommendations?
Ask HN: Best way to learn STM32 and embedded for beginner
My google foo is producing garbage - Most tutorials don't go past blinky. Most suggest CubeIDE, others have suggested ChibiOS. I followed some tutorials on stmbase to get a blinky going on a ST Nucleo, but it used a HAL library and it feels like cheating. I'm really looking for a good book/site that walks through a bunch of tutorials/learning to go from blinking an LED on a STM32 right the way up to me being able to design and build my own Smart watch based on a Cortex M33 or M55. QSPI flash, I2C sensors, bluetooth, power management, some DSP. What would be the best suggested way to do this?
Ask HN: How did the internet discover my subdomain?
I have a domain that is not live. As expected, loading the domain returns: Error 1016.
However...I have a subdomain with a not obvious name, like: userfileupload.sampledomain.com
This subdomain IS LIVE but has NOT been publicized/posted anywhere. It's a custom URL for authenticated users to upload media with presigned url to my Cloudflare r2 bucket.
I am using CloudFlare for my DNS.
How did the internet find my subdomain? Some sample user agents are: "Expanse, a Palo Alto Networks company, searches across the global IPv4 space multiple times per day to identify customers' presences on the Internet. If you would like to be excluded from our scans, please send IP addresses/domains to: scaninfo@paloaltonetworks.com", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_7; en-us) AppleWebKit/534.20.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Safari/534.20.8", "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 9; Redmi Note 5 Pro) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/76.0.3809.89 Mobile Safari/537.36",
The bots are GET requests which are failing, as designed, but I'm wondering how the bots even knew the subdomain existed?!
Ask HN: How to study for system design that doesn't include front end/back end?
I got a system design interview where I was asked to build a pricer for a financial product, then expand it to multiple pricers that might share inputs.
This was not the typical system design interview where you have to deal with APIs / load balancers / latency / etc
I have studied that a lot, but what about these type of general interviews?
Tell HN: I wish there was "IntelliSense" for math-heavy papers
Here's an idea for anyone in search for a project: Some papers define a lot of ad-hoc variable symbols. It would be easier to follow them if one could hover over a symbol used in an equation and see its definition, just like in an IDE.
Ask HN: What do you use to create diagrams?
I've been working on a diagramming tool [1] and wanted to get some thoughts from people who regularly make architecture and other technical diagrams. I know my own experiences but I'm quite curious to hear others.
I'm guessing for a lot of people draw.io and Excalidraw are probably the go-to. If you use draw.io (or something else), what do you like about it, or what do you wish was better?
[1] - https://app.vexlio.com/ for the curious
Ask HN: Does legal tax evasion work for regular people?
Hello fellow HN readers,
For some time now I've been researching how to become a digital nomad and legally optimise my taxes.
There are numerous services that claim to be able to help with this, here are just two examples that I found:
https://taxhackers.io
https://denationalize.me
Does anyone have any experience of this and can tell me if it really works and is legal?
Also, why do they charge so much when there are other services that can do this for much less (e.g. Stripe Atlas: https://stripe.com/atlas)?
I am thinking of moving to Thailand, but I do not want to be a perpetual traveller. Can setting up a US LLC as a non-resident (or a UAE free zone company) be considered "foreign sourced income" without being taxed even if I am a tax resident of Thailand (>180 days living there) and what experience can you possibly share if you have tried something like this before?
What additional advice can you give me and others to make this a great trip instead of a nightmare?
Thanks for all your input and a healthy discussion on this topic!
Tell HN: An ode to the lost magic of the 2010s ZIRP startups
("ZIRP" means "Zero Interest Rate Policy btw)
It really is incredible how suddenly the world changes. Many of us are now unemployed, facing layoffs, taking salary cuts and enduring grueling work environments to try and get through the worst tech recession since 2008.
I myself now work in a fusty, old and stable government department in Europe.
But I once worked for a couple of 2010s ZIRP startups. And what places they were.
People from across Europe and the world would rock up to these places and bring their seductive cocktail of cultural insight, experiences and languages. And they were motivated primarily to create something new and cool. The types who would have hated the fusty corporate offices that many of us now flee to in search of job security.
And the energy was explosive. Sure most of their companies didn't make much profit or, in many cases, even revenue - but the magic was palpable. Not least because the company socials brought together so many people from different cultures and countries.
Love, friendships (and even startup founder partnerships) were forged in these places. And this magic was often sparked overseas at company global socials that flew everyone to party in foreign lands. I myself was flown to New York alongside everyone else in the London office to party for three days. It was crazy.
Much of that magic was captured in photographs that disappeared not long before those bankruptcies were declared.
Many of those people have since moved on to more sensible lives, corporate jobs and the bright beginnings of early middle age.
But for a moment, it was magic.
Ask HN: Would you fund Mozilla to become independent of Google?
How much would you and or your company be willing to fund Mozilla should it need to become independent of Google?
Ask HN: Do your eyes bug you even though your prescription is "correct"?
I’m digging into an idea around eyeglasses, screen-time, and vision discomfort. If you wear prescription glasses but still get headaches, eye strain, or blurry vision after long screen days, I’d love to chat briefly (20–30 min).
Pure research, zero selling.
Interested? Drop a comment below or email me directly at jbornhorst [at] gmail.com. I’ll coordinate a convenient time to talk.
Ask HN: Bedridden for 3 months. Time to pivot?
After a decade as a full-stack developer (mostly back-end CRUD work, nothing cutting-edge), I'm now on medical leave and mostly bedridden, while I get treatment for a moderately serious condition.
That means I'll be on leave for at least 3 months.
While I’m grateful to have a fully paid medical leave for the entirety of my absence, I'm also terrified about what it means for my current job.
My company laid off a significant percentage of my colleagues over the past couple of years, and I'm afraid my role will be at risk after having someone take over my responsibilities and contributions for such a prolonged period.
Therefore, I don't want to waste this time.
My goal is to retrain into a high-specialization, future-resistant field, ideally adjacent to AI/ML, since that’s where the momentum (and compensation) seems to be.
My background: - 10 years in software dev (Java/Spring, Python, some React). - Comfortable with algorithms, databases, distributed systems. - Zero ML/AI experience beyond basic Coursera dabbling.
Constraints: - 3 months of ~4hrs/day study time. Prefer self-guided resources (books, MOOCs, OSS projects). - Targeting roles that aren’t easily automated (e.g., niches where human expertise + technical depth matter).
What specialized subfields of AI/ML (or adjacent domains) would you prioritize? (E.g., reinforcement learning, MLops, AI safety, etc.)
What concrete resources (courses, books, codebases) would you recommend for a fast ramp-up?
Are there lesser-known niches (e.g., quant-focused ML, robotics, etc.) where a software vet could pivot quickly?
No sugarcoating: if this is unrealistic, don't hesitate to say so. But if you’ve successfully pivoted into AI/ML (or know someone who did), I’d love to hear your battle plan.
PS: I'll also appreciate any recommendations on any gear/devices that facilitate using a laptop while on bed.
Chrome for Android doesn't have extensions, but Edge now has a whole store
Microsoft edge's latest build version 134.0.3124.57, just added a whole new web-store for Android user unlike google. Extensions are great for adding a tiny bit of functionality to a browsing experience without dedicating an entire app to run in the background. For instance, some users like to use VPNs securely tied in from the browser itself rather than running the full-scale app.
Ask HN: Should there be new RPN calculators to replace the TI-84?
I took an exam today where only TI calculators were available. I felt I was caught between some older models where the TI interface was not quite worked out.
And I don't see much progress then trying my daughter's TI-84.
Ask HN: Which X11 server do you use on Android?
I have a Google Pixel phone. The latest (March) software update included the ability to enable a new 'Terminal' app which drops you into a debian shell.
I looked in the Play Store for X11 servers. I found two:
1. Mocha X11: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.mochasoft.x11
2. RNX XIO X11 GUI: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.awnto.rnx.xio
#2 seems to work only with a specific linux distribution.
#1 seems to work fine, and I trust the company because ~25 years ago I used their 5250 emulator for Windows, and it was great.
I also found an open source one in the IzzOnDroid F-Droid repo:
3. https://github.com/nwrkbiz/android-xserver
That seems less cluttered than the Mochasoft one, but I can't get it to keep an app up for more than a few seconds: the terminal reports the connection to the X server was broken.
I'm curious whether you're using one of these and/or whether there's a better option?
Ask HN: Any jobs that don't force you to always be advancing career wise?
(Throwaway for hopefully obvious reasons) I’m a software developer (web, fullstack) that’s been in the industry for about 10 years now and I’ve gotten to a point where I don’t care about advancing my career. My current title is Senior Software Engineer and, if I had it my way, I would be happy to keep that title for the rest of my career. I tried being a manager for a bit and hated it, and, in a similar fashion, the increased responsibility and scope of going down the road of Staff+ engineer holds no interest to me.
My only issue is that my current job has a very strong “up or out” mentality that I’m starting to push up against. And most other places I’ve worked at or talk about with friends seem to have similar attitudes toward career progression. I just want to do my job well, learn new things, and contribute to the businesses success. I don’t want to have to try and figure out with my manager what projects I should work on to make myself look good and be able to work my way up the ladder.
Has anyone worked somewhere that they felt they could just do their job without worrying about the career advancement aspect? I’ve contracted a bit and know that this would align well with this goal, but I enjoy having health insurance and not having to scrounge for work all the time.
Ask HN: Where do seasoned devs look for short-term work?
Hello HN
In a short form question: If you do, where do you look for a short time projects?
I'd like to put my skill set to use and work on a project, I'm available for 6-9 months. The problem seems to be for me, that I cannot find any way of finding such project.
I'm quite skilled, I have 15 years of experience, first 3 as a system administrator, then I went full on developer - have been full stack for 2 of those years, then switched my focus fully on the backend - and ended up as platform data engineer - optimizing the heck out of systems to be able to process data fast and reliably at larger scale.
I already went through UpWork, Toptal and such and to my disappointment, there was no success to be found.
Do you know of any project boards, or feature bounty platforms, that I could use to find a short time project?
Thank you for your wisdom :)
What are some cool accessibility ideas you've seen?
As someone new to the field, sonification is pretty mind-blowing. I'm sighted and overly reliant on vision, so I never imagined how a combination of pitch, volume, and even instruments could talk about data shape.